hold on to your sphincter...this is a long'n:
Call of Duty is seeing some major improvements and additions in Black Ops 2′s multiplayer – more that you might of initially expected.
We’ve already learned about some of the initial Black Ops 2 multiplayer features back in September, including Pick 10, scorestreaks and wildcards etc., but after having recently visited the Treyarch Studios down in Santa Monica LA, MP1st was fortunate enough to preview a slew of brand new multiplayer features and content that have yet to be revealed.
Though unable to attend the event in person, game design director David Vonderhaar put together an informative presentation detailing some the exciting new multiplayer goodness making its way to Black Ops 2 this November 13.
Game Modes
Multi-Team
At launch, three modes will be playable with up to three different teams within the regular assortment of playlists. These three teams can be made up of three to four players. Treyarch calls these “3×3′s” and “3X4′s.” Multi-team game modes include:
Team Deathmatch
Kill Confirmed
Hardpoint
Party Games
Party Games essentially replaces Wager Matches from the original Black Ops. However, players will now be able to earn XP and rank up in the regular progression. Game types include:
Gun Game
Sticks and Stones (Yes, the crossbow and ballistic knife are returning.)
One in the Chamber
Sharpshooter
Combat Training
Combat Training is now integrated into the main game and will include three different modes at launch.
Bootcamp – In Bootcamp, players can rank up from level 1 to level 10 while gaining full experience. This playlist is solely made up of the Team Deathmatch game mode and pits one team of humans and bots against another team of human and bots. This eases the level of expectation placed on someone who may be new to the game.
Objective – Here, players can rank past level 10, but will not earn the full amount of XP. Once again, two teams made up of both humans and bots are pitted against each other in various objective-based game modes.
Bot Stom – No XP is earned in Bot Storm. Quite simply, a team of humans is pitted agains a team of bots – great for practice, map knowledge, and nailing down the basics of Call of Duty.
Customization
All game modes are customizable in Black Ops 2. Bots can be added to almost all game modes if a team needs filling out, for example. Players will also have the power to restrict content like certain attachments, perks and equipment. Interestingly, players will also be able to redesign the Pick 10 system to either a Pick 3 to Pick 17 system and anything in between. This can make for some extremely skill-based matches when weapons, perks and equipment are limited to only three slots. A slew of competitive settings and options have also been thrown in, including how FFA, TDM and CTS are scored, the ability to turn off 3rd person spectating, the ability to disable the announcer and a whole lot more.
Challenges
Challenges reward players for almost anything and everything – ranging from simple tasks to more difficult feats. Completing challenges is ‘the’ way to unlock cosmetic content for your character which can be shared throughout all aspects of the multiplayer. These challenges, numbering in the thousands, also reward players with XP in order to level up even faster.
Every weapon in the game, including atypical weapons like launchers, knives and assault shields all have challenges for camoflage patterns. Once these base camos are unlocked for a weapon, a whole new set of challenges are unlocked to complete for special camos, including some interesting hidden ones.
These challenges also extend to optic reticles. There are a total of eight unique reticles for each optic that are all unique to that optic which can all help your aim and precision. Just for the lol’s, Treyarch has also thrown in a number of comical shapes, including a mustache, aka “The Steve,” as well as the “EOTech Zombie Stopper.”
In-game, these rewards show up as a neatly presented icon in the top center of the screen when earned and are reviewable in the after-action report.
Player Cards
Every Player Card in Black Ops 2 is made up of these elements: a background, a clan tag, a player’s matchmaking level and a player’s current League Play rank.
In the emblem editor, players will have up to 32 layers to work with. Objects can be flipped, moved, rotated, scaled and copied and pasted from one layer to another. The choice of colors has been improved and RGB color mixing can also be tweaked. The emblem editor now also supports transparency.
Should you choose not to create your own emblem, default emblems will also be provided. For those willing to get creative, more complex shapes will become available upon completing specific challenges. When it comes to backgrounds, over 150 are selectable, not all of which are simple rectangular shapes.
Theater
The theater mode in Black Ops 2 is back and has seen some major improvements while keeping all the same tools, including the dolly cam, from previous Call of Duty’s. The new Social Features allow players to bookmark gameplays so that they can be revisited, meaning it’s now much easier to go back and search for your favorite moments after a plentiful night of games. The Meta Data has been expanded to include score, captures and defends while the robust Community Filter can help sort videos to a player’s preference. Up and down-voting is now also included for both films and screenshots.
An extremely powerful new feature, the Highlight Reel, allows players to create a film with the simple touch of a button. Simply load a game in the theater, select ‘Hightlight Reel,’ and “bam,” the game instantly creates your very own montage of your most excellent moments. Settings can be customized, however, to expand or simplify the contents of your film. Further editing can be done once completed as well.
As previously mentioned, players can also CoDCast previously recorded games in order to either get some practice in, or create some nifty commentaries. Parties can now head into theater mode and watch videos together while having the ability to watch any player from a first-person perspective.
Treyarch has also doubled the amount of clips or segments that can be put together in one video – up to 20 in total. Additionally, clips can now be merged into each other, creating one big clip. The brand new Attach to Object feature, a brilliant addition, will let players produce some really fancy shots. By entering free-roam, objects that are selectable will turn green. When selected, the camera will simply follow that object as it moves throughout the gameplay. Objects can range from various scorestreaks all the way down to the rocket that is launched out of an RPG. This means you can now follow said rocket in slow-mo as it plows into your enemies face.
Prestige
What everyone’s been waiting for.
Treyarch is handling prestige very differently in Black Ops 2. Once again, assumptions are being challenged. No longer is Prestige a “restart” as it was in previous Call of Duty titles. This time around, weapon experience and earned attachments are are carried over, as are all challenges.
Black Ops 2 is meant to be played all the way to prestige 10. Upon prestige-ing, tokens are rewarded to the player which can then be used to unlock what ever item you want forever, including items that you have yet to reach the required level for. On top of these tokens, an additional reward can be selected. These rewards include:
New create a class slot – Up to 5 extra slots.
Stats Reset – This is a complete wipe of all stats and unlocks. This is essentially like buying the game new.
Refund – This gives back all unlock tokens a player has spent so far that prestige level. This basically allows players to re-roll or re-spec their character.
Only at prestige 10 is absolutely everything unlocked for the player. It seems Treyarch really wants players to see it through to the end in Black Ops 2 in order to achieve 100% of the benefits
Black Ops II Game Design Director David Vonderhaar (sans glasses)
In August, Black Ops II’s game design director David Vonderhaar spoke at length about the core multiplayer features of Call of Duty: Black Ops II. And while he did offer a mighty mountain of information, that wasn’t the whole story. ”We knew that there was so much going on that it was too big to have one reveal meeting,” says Vahn. “And who really wants to listen to me talk for more than 30 minutes at a time?”
If you are one of the tens of millions of gamers looking forward to Call of Duty: Black Ops II, you probably just raised your hand. But the real reason for Vahn’s self-effacing attitude is that he wants your attention focused squarely on the game. The team from Treyarch has already revealed big features like the pick-10 system, live streaming, and CODcasting; today, Vahn wants to talk in detail about gameplay modes, how challenges work, the improvements to theater mode, and the new definition for what it means to Prestige.
Game Modes: How You’ll Play
Black Ops II offers four main game modes. The game types in Core mode should look mostly familiar:
Team Deathmatch
Free-For-All
Domination
Demolition
Kill Confirmed
Hardpoint
Headquarters
Capture the Flag
Search & Destroy
Yes, Kill Confirmed is, uh, confirmed for Black Ops II, thanks to its popularity in MW3. New game type Hardpoint is Treyarch’s take on classic “king of the hill” matches, where all the players rush to the same place on the map and try to hold it the longest (until it moves). No bomb to defuse or destroy, no flag to capture or defend – just be the man or try to beat the man. Vahn describes it as “total chaos, super fast-paced, super fun.” Of these Core game types, three will be available for multi-team play: TDM, Kill Confirmed, and Hardpoint. You can create games with up to six teams, including lopsided ones for handicap matches. If you want to create an 11-on-1 match and have someone CODcast it as well, go for it.
Overflow probably looked cleaner before the river messed everything up.
I got to play some of these modes on three new multiplayer maps. Express is a bullet train station in future Los Angeles — the high speed rail my tax dollars paid for has finally arrived, and now it’s the site for a shootout. Overflow offers urban destruction in downtown Pakistan; as its name suggests, a nearby river has overflowed, throwing ruined boats in the middle of the street. Domination was quite taut on this level, as all three points exist on the same central street, leaving the side paths open for flankers. Hijacked is a private yacht complete with hottubs that provide hiding spaces; I thought the map had a good flow through the middle as well as a passage underneath and routes on both sides of the ship. It’s close and confined but not too claustrophobic for TDM.
Party games are easily explained: “We want you to play these with your COD party,” says Vahn. They’re familiar fan favorites that grew out of customized community games: Gun Game, One in the Chamber, Sharpshooter, and Sticks & Stones. Vahn says that these four will be available at launch, but suggests Party games could evolve going forward: “We think there’s a lot of opportunity to grow this list over the next year.”
Combat Training will also return for Black Ops II. “As popular as COD is, there are a lot of people who don’t play MP,” says Vahn. “And quite frankly, this bugs the shit out of us. They should all play MP. And Combat Training helps us get there.” What’s more, Combat Training is no longer on its own level progression ladder; it’s now integrated with your “real” MP rank. So in Boot Camp mode, CT offers 12-player matches – three humans and three bots per team – and the first ten levels you gain in Boot Camp are real levels that you’ll keep for your public MP rank. Objective games in CT will give you XP beyond level 10, but you only gain XP at half the rate that you do in regular public matches. It’s the same 3+3 teams, but as the name suggests, you’re playing objective-based games (except for S&D). That’s right – the bots know how to play Domination now! The third Combat Training mode is Bot Stomp, which gives a six-player human team the chance to just destroy teams of AI suckers. “It’s pretty fun to kick bots asses,” admits Vahn, “and as a new player, that’s really rewarding.” It’s also good place to practice tactics with your team – you know, combat training.
Bullet trains meet real bullets on Express.
Last but not least are Custom Games, which Vahn admits “have haunted me for two years, but today, it’s all good.” The reason for the change? “Every variation of every game mode is supported in custom games.” Players can also build their own custom classes, add bots, modify competitive rules, and restrict content. “You think that Claymores are the devil?” poses Vahn. “You can restrict it.” If you feel Pick 10 is too flexible, you make your players work within a smaller area of Pick 5 – the lowest is Pick 3 if you feel particularly cruel, and the highest is Pick-17 if you feel especially generous. “This mode lets you define the fun in your own terms,” says Vahn. “You get to put on your game designer hat. If someone thinks they can do a better job than us, I’m fine with it.”
Stepping Up to Challenges
“We wanted to make sure that players get rewarded for branching out from their usual comfort zone and experiencing more content,” says Vahn – and the way to do that is Challenges. All Challenges offer XP –there are thousands of them! – plus personalization features and cosmetic elements like reticles and weapon camos are all tied to challenges. “Every single weapon in the game, including rocket launchers and knives and assault shields, has camo,” says Vahn. There are 10 types of camo in the base set of challenges; once you unlock those, even more open up. Carbon fiber and gold are confirmed, plus Vahn is promising some special ones you may discover later on. Similarly, there are eight reticles for each optic; the fun one we saw was shaped like a mustache. Even more interesting was the biohazard symbol called the Zombie Stopper – a real optic created by EOTech. Vahn says EOTech and Treyarch are mutual fans of each other’s work.
That millimeter wave scanner optic is killer. You choose the reticle.
Challenges will also unlock emblems and backgrounds for your playercard, which also contains your clan tag, your level, and your League Play rank. The emblem editor is back, now supporting 32 layers and transparencies as well as a full RGB color picker. “Sometimes we think we’re making Photoshop,” quips Vahn. There will be more than 150 shapes for your emblems in total, but only basic geometric shapes will be available at the start; Challenges will unlock more complex shapes, like the silhouette of a soldier. Likewise, there are more than 150 playercard backgrounds, with special ones unlocked by achieving Challenge goals.
The Theater is Open
The ability to make your own short films from gameplay was a huge draw for the original Black Ops as well as MW3, yet some gamers were frightened off by its complexity. “You do not have to be a film director to enjoy a film,” suggests Vahn, so Theater is being improved for both serious directors and newbies who prefer to point and shoot bullets instead of scenes.
New social features will make things easier for both camps. You can now easily bookmark a film and find it later; that way you don’t have to stop playing with friends and edit your footage before you forget when and where something cool happened. Game footage contains enhanced metadata, including not only time and date but also the map, the game mode, and even your stats. That means if you remember going 30 and 2 (assuming that’s not an everyday occurrence), you can search for games where you went 30 and 2 and it’ll show up right away. Your victories are also sorted separately since those are the games you’re more likely to want to remember and share. A community tab makes it easy to see what your pals are up to in Theater mode, and a new up/down voting makes it simple for the community to anoint its favorite films. “You’ve got to be able to browse it like watching a movie on Netflix,” stresses Vahn.
For the dedicated film editors, Black Ops II will not only allow 20 clips in a film (twice as many as the original Black Ops), but it will let you combine those clips, sort of like “bouncing down tracks” in a multitrack audio recording. Say you’ve used 20 clips but you want to add more. Combine 19 of those clips into one – the edits of which you logically can’t go back and tweak later – and you’ve just freed up 18 more clip slots. The dolly cam is returning for epic sweeping shots, plus you see game footage from the first-person perspective of any player, and you can now attach the camera to any object. That’s right – you can now see every glorious/cheap RPG kill from the rocket’s point of view.
Put a camera on that turret. Or that assault shield. Or the quadrotor. Or any damned object in the whole damned game.
And if you are the kind of person who simply doesn’t want to be bothered with reviewing your best moments of your best games…why not have the game do it for you? The Highlight Reel function is a one-button solution – press it and the game will search your game replay data for what it believes are the high points, such as capturing flags, defending a zone, or going on a sweet scorestreak. The game ranks your moments on a five-star system then strings together the highest rated bits and delivers you a best-of montage.
The New Prestige
One of the biggest changes in Black Ops II has to be its Prestige system. Traditionally, when you reach the maximum level in the game, you can choose to Prestige and start a new lap of progress. That’s still the case, but as with so many things in Black Ops II, the team scrutinized every system of Call of Duty and only kept the parts that made sense to them. “We are really challenging the assumption that Prestige means ‘let’s do that all over again,’” says Vahn. “Why is it like that? Maybe Prestige should be a continuation, not a reset or a do-over — not trading all your stats for an icon. That’s cruel.”
So, in Black Ops II, activating Prestige mode does not reset your weapon XP or your Challenge progress – you simply pick up where you left off when you wrap around. “Black Ops II is designed to continue to be played,” explains Vahn. “We want you to Prestige.” Each time you do, you will receive a Prestige Unlock Token, which is different from the standard level progression token. You can use this to ignore the level gate and unlock an item permanently, much like you can in MW3. You can choose between adding a create-a-class slot, resetting all your stats to factory-fresh status (“Keep your little brother away from that button,” warns Vahn), or refunding your standard level tokens. Like re-speccing or re-rolling your character in an MMO, a refund will give you back all the unlock tokens you have spent so far in that Prestige level for you to redistribute as you see fit. Vahn illustrated with a specific example from his own experience: Say you are working on a Claymore Challenge, but you don’t finish it up before you hit max level and Prestige. You can Prestige, finish up the Challenge, then refund your points for that level and start working on a different challenge with different equipment if you want. And – most importantly for hardware players — when you hit the highest level of Prestige (level 10 in Black Ops II), you will be awarded the title of Prestige Master and all content is unlocked. Access to all the toys – you can has it.
All the weapons and attachments are unlocked for Prestige Masters.
Black Ops II: Built For You
Vahn stresse that the team at Treyarch wants Black Ops II to appeal to casual and hardcore alike – from emblem creation to one-button filmmaking to visible rewards for high-end weapon masters, there really should be something for everyone here. “Whether you’re a total noob or a grizzled veteran, there’s something in this game for all those types of players,” says Vahn. “Even the people who just like to create content. It’s a massive, massive game for all players of all skill levels.”
Yesterday we were lucky enough to get some more hands on time with Black Ops 2 over at Treyarch in Santa Monica. We were invited out to a community event and got to play 6 straight hours of multiplayer over 8 Maps (3 never before seen) and had access to every item (gun, attachment, camo, etc.) in the game. Everything was completely unlocked for us to play with. We were also allowed to capture gameplay footage from the new MP map “Hijacked” which we’ll be uploading to our channel in the next day or so HERE.
Treyarch’s Studio head Mark Lamia kicked off the event with the brand new Zombie trailer and gave us all a great rundown on what to expect with new zombie modes. Afterwards, David Vanderhaar declassified the last remaining intel in regards to BO2 multiplayer. Here’s what we learned:
10 Prestige Emblems- We saw all 10 Prestige emblems, and they are by far the best prestige emblems in Call of Duty. The best way to describe the tenth emblem is a half skull/half zombie head. All emblems are unique and incredibly more detailed than past CoD prestige emblems.
Challenges- Don’t reset after you prestige.
Keep Prestiging- The prestige and rank system has been designed so that every player will keep prestiging. Treyarch is giving you more incentive to keep prestiging by limiting the amount of stuff you lose.
Prestige Tokens- Are returning, except this time you get to keep your gun progress (attachments) with which ever gun you chose to permanently unlock.
In Addition to 1 unlock token, you get to pick 1 option below:
Extra Create-a-class Slot- Just like before, only 5 extra slots for a total of 10.
Reset- Returning from MW3, complete reset if you choose to.
Refund- A new feature in BO2, allows you to undo a previous unlock token and spend it somewhere else.
More Layers- 35 total layers to be exact. Some of the emblems Treyarch made blew our minds.
RGB Color- Not only do you have the original standard colors to choose from, you can now use custom colors from the RGB scale if your want to be picky about which colors you’re using.
Transparency- Make the background of your emblem transparent. Which means a carefully placed emblem over a player card could make for some interesting combinations. Treyarch put this to good use when designing the player cards for BO2 (which look amazing and more detailed by the way)
Dolly Cam- Its returning in Black Ops 2. Nuff said.
Sticky Camera- Basically have the camera stick to and follow non-player objects. In the example we saw, the camera followed a Quadrotor in 3rd person, in another the camera followed a RPG missile while in flight. This is the best addition to theater mode in our opinion, we saw this new feature in action and cant wait to see what people do with it.
20 Clips per video- The clip count has now been raised to a whopping 20. Edit and crop a gameplay video into 20 different segments for editing. You can even merge all 20 clips into 1 clip and then keep going.
Kill Confirmed- It’s returning and plays just like MW3. The dog tags have been slightly upgrades and appear brighter (more futuristic looking too)
Hardpoint- Brand new game mode for Black Ops 2. Players must hold a single objective for a certain amount of time before it move to another random spot on the map. Very fast passed mode which results in a high number of kills.
Party Games- Is the new name for custom or private matches. They’re designed to be played with a party (group of friends). One in the Chamber, Gun Game and some more favorites are returning.
Bootcamp- Designed to introduce new players to multiplayer. Teams are Human+Bots VS. Human+Bots.
Bot Stomp- The original Combat Training mode, Humans VS Bots.
Express- Los Angeles Bullet Train Station. Good up and down engagements on bullet train tracks. A train will speed along the tracks every a couple minutes or so. If you’re in it’s path then consider yourself dead LOL. (My favorite of the new maps)
Hijacked- Luxurious Super Yacht. Frantic, yet controlled close quarter engagements.
Plaza- Rundown section of Panama. Get close quarters engagements and tough chokes to fight over.
Remember, we’ll be uploading footage very soon of gameplay on the MP map “Hijacked”. Our footage will feature the never before seen Assault rifle “M27″, Five-seveN, SCAR-H, MP7 and the Cross Bow.
That’s it for now, we’ll have plenty more coming this week so stay frosty!
Link to information:-
https://twitter.com/charlieintel/sta...35648122900480